Shining Through (11 page)

I was so taken up with these new Berringers, wondering who they were and when they’d died, that I didn’t notice the picture until my elbow rested on something slick. It was a small, glossy snapshot of Nan and John. They were lying together on a hammock, their arms and legs so tangled up they looked like one person. She wore shorts and a pullover. He wore cotton slacks.

No shirt. Nan’s head rested on his shoulder and her hand, with its wedding ring, seemed to have been caught by the camera as it caressed his bare chest. They weren’t talking profundity in that hammock. What they had was what I would have died for.

SHINING THROUGH / 73

God, was John beautiful! Nothing I’d imagined being under his suit was as good as what was in that little picture. His body was so perfect it almost didn’t seem real. It looked as sleek and as hard as the modern furniture Nan loved. No wonder she hadn’t been able to keep her hand to herself.

I took a deep breath. I put everything back into the envelope.

Well, I thought, and let out a high half laugh, that was a good night’s work.

Then I turned off the lamp, sat in the black room and started to cry.

5

T
he sun sparkled, and the surface of the dark water of Sheepshead Bay glittered as if someone had tossed in a handful of diamonds. Gladys Slade, wearing a middy blouse that would have looked great on a kid in third-grade assembly, stood with her hand shielding her eyes. But she did it so dramatically she could have been Admiral of the Fleet, saluting all the ships at sea. “Mr. Leland used to have a summer house right on the water.

In Connecticut.” She spoke a little too loud, as if to be heard over the crash of the waves, except there weren’t any waves—only the relaxed slapping of water against the wooden piles of the pier. “He sold it when Nan went off to boarding school, right before the Crash. I hear he made a pret-ty penny.”

Gladys could take any subject—water,
The Private Lives of
Elizabeth and Essex
, pickled watermelon rinds—and tie it up to the law firm.

I sighed. My best friend. But to tell the truth, Gladys was one of the unspoken minuses of being an old maid. Forget about your face shriveling into a prune, about not having children, about having to support yourself; the real bad news was that you got stuck with other old maids for friends. I know that sounds hard-hearted, but frankly, 99.99999 percent of them were walking around ringless not because of a receding chin or a polka-dot complexion but because of some tragic flaw in the personality department—no humor, or too much, or they were whiny or pathetically eager to please. All my friends from high school, bright, lively girls,

74

SHINING THROUGH / 75

had gotten grabbed up, and right from the start they were too busy keeping their husbands captivated to have any spare nights for girls like me: the Unfortunate Unmarried. And so, sure, maybe I did spend most of my time longing for John, but part of that yearning was pure: a prayer for someone to talk to who had something to say.

Gladys continued to squint out at the bay. A slight breeze ruffled her bangs, and she clapped them tight against her forehead as if her head had been hit by a hurricane. “So anyway, he had this house on the water,” she went on. “And then his wife dies. Well! Linda, there were
days
at a time when he didn’t show up at work. He didn’t even call in or anything. You know what he did? He’d leave little Nan with her nanny—isn’t that funny?

Nan, nanny—and drive up to Connecticut and take out his sailboat and just sail for four or five days,
all alone
. Not that anyone ever said anything.” She looked away from the bay, right at me. “They wouldn’t have dared. I mean, even way back then, Mr. Leland had that way about him, and being a war hero and all that, he could pretty much do what he wanted. But you know what the most fascinating thing is? He chose classiness. It was what he automatically wanted, even in grief. I mean, sailing is
very
stylish.”

“Why does going out in a sailboat make him classy? Is puking on a starboard or whatever it’s called an upper-class mourning practice?”

“You just talk like that to get attention,” Gladys said. “‘Puking.’

And sex things.”

“Never in the same sentence.”

“I’m serious, Linda. And if you don’t mind, while I’m on the subject of your talking: You kept forcing everybody at lunch Friday to listen while you went on about the war, like you were a man or a college professor and it was really interesting. You’ve got to stop it. I mean, name me one single person in the law firm—not counting lawyers—who wants to hear about troop movements. I’ll bet you anything the lawyers don’t even care.”

I looked across the dazzling sunlit water. “Listen to me, 76 / SUSAN ISAACS

Gladys. Don’t you understand that it’s not just Europe—or Asia?

It’s the whole world. It’s
you
.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m telling you, France will be next.”

“Here it comes: Miss Linda Voss with her ever-popular ‘The Big, Bad Nazis’ song and dance.”

“Gladys, don’t you get what people are letting Hitler do to them? They’re giving up because they’re terrified—of a bully.

What do they think he’s going to do next? Send them roses?

No, he’s going to hit them again, harder and harder.”

Unlike Gladys, the part of the world that read beyond the society news and the comics was actually surprised. That was what was so hard for me to believe: that all the military geniuses and hotshot politicians couldn’t have figured out what was going to happen.

In Brooklyn it was a beautiful spring Sunday. People were smiling as if they didn’t have a care in the world. But the Germans were on the march again. Holland was gone, Belgium was going.

“You always expect the worst from them,” Gladys said.

“They always do the worst.”

“But you’re German, Linda.”

“I am not.”

“I don’t mean you go around drinking beer from those funny glasses. It’s just that…you are
very
interested in whatever they do.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Not the way you are. I mean, grabbing everybody’s newspaper, reading
battle
reports.” She looked at me accusingly. “Anita was talking about her bridesmaids’ gifts, and you started going on about the Maginot Line.”

The Sunday crowds filled the sidewalks. Teenage boys spilled onto the piers. They’d taken off their shirts, ignoring the slight spring chill, and rolled them into pillows and stretched out on the wood boards. Their chests, white from winter, rose and fell with each relaxed breath. But before SHINING THROUGH / 77

long, a dark, leather-skinned boat captain yelled, “Hey, get outta here!” And the kids got up, put on their shirts and shuffled off, mumbling, “In your hat and over your ears, bud.” But they were a good-natured bunch.

“Gladys, listen to me. If those boys lived in the countries their families came from, they’d be carrying rifles.” Then I added: “Or they’d be dead.”

Gladys started to stroll again. I gave up and went along.

Everyone in the city wanted to be outside on a day like this.

They all seemed to have grabbed a trolley and come to Sheepshead Bay to stare at the water and inhale the sharp salt air. For a nickel, it was like traveling to another country. Gladys and I weaved in and out of the crowd. Finally, we found an empty bench. I sat and put my head way back and let the sun warm my cheeks.

Gladys and I spent every Sunday together; I wasn’t sure whether to feel grateful or doomed. It had started a couple of months after my Grandma Olga died. Suddenly, I had a long day with no company; Saturday was Binge Night for my mother, so Sundays she could barely manage to stagger to the bathroom, much less walk around the block. I’d said to Gladys one Friday in the office, Maybe if you’re free Sunday, if you want to go to a movie or something…I was nervous she’d think I was overstepping the bounds of what was a nice office friendship, but she said, Well, I have nothing special this Sunday, as if every other Sunday for the next two years was booked up.

So we went to a movie and then out for a club sandwich, and while I was trying to decide whether to wait three or six months before asking again, Gladys said, Do you want to go for a ride on the Staten Island ferry next Sunday?

After all those years with the whole world married, I had someone to do things with. A friend. We went all over the city, mainly to movies, but sometimes to the zoo, the botanical gardens, a couple of times even to a museum.

She was my best friend, my only one, but all we ever had on those Sundays was more lunch conversation—although 78 / SUSAN ISAACS

with hideously elaborate detail. Did you know Mr. Nugent was Phi Beta Kappa? You never saw his key? Or: Helen Rogers says Margaret on the switchboard says the widow Mr. Leland is keeping company with is a Mrs. Carter. Or Mrs. Carver. Last year he was seeing Mrs. Lambert Jones. The divorcée, but it wasn’t her fault. Did I tell you about her? See, her husband fell in love with her son’s cello teacher. Anyway, Mrs. Jones—the first one; she’s not supposed to be musical and the husband
loved
music—she has practically a mansion on Fifth Avenue and…

Gladys was ecstatic to have all Sunday—an entire day uninterrupted by work—to talk about the office. Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley: that was the extent of her life. And I never asked for anything deeper from her, because I’d poked around and discovered her passion for the law firm was her sole passion. She liked the movies only to the degree that Gary Cooper in
Sergeant
York
reminded her of Mr. Leland.

“If you’re so American,” Gladys suddenly said to me, “why did you bring German magazines to the office? And how come you know more about what’s happening over there than Roosevelt?”

“If I know more than Roosevelt, then we’re all going to be goose-stepping a year from now.” I turned and looked at her.

“Listen, don’t you understand what’s going on over there?”

“I read the
Mirror
and the
Journal-American
.”

“So?”

“So I still can’t see why you get so…” She paused to find a word. “Upset.”

“Upset? Did the
Mirror
or the
Journal
happen to mention what those Nazi shit-heads did to Holland?”

“Linda!”

We both sat back and stared out at the bay; she wouldn’t look at me. The boats at the piers right in front of us—
Little Muriel
and
Star of Brooklyn
—bobbed on the gentle, lapping water. The Nazis were bombing Belgium, mopping up in Holland—murdering the few good men they hadn’t already SHINING THROUGH / 79

slaughtered—and Gladys was reeling from shock because I’d called them shit-heads.

I couldn’t understand people. Gladys, the other girls at work, my neighbors. Why weren’t they angrier? I got hot under the collar just thinking about the excuses people had been making since the year before: Oh, Hitler had some good reasons for going into Czechoslovakia.

Come on. If you’re a German dictator with a problem, you throw a few chancellors together in a room and you figure something out. You don’t go rolling in with panzer divisions.

If you have a beef with someone, do you send in the Luftwaffe with a couple of tons of bombs, the way he did to Rotterdam, that son of a bitch?

“Do you really think he’ll go into France?” Gladys finally asked. Her voice was a little softer; maybe I was too hard on her. She was no dope, but she didn’t want any part of what was happening over there, so she’d simply put it out of her mind.

Now, though, Americans were beginning to get troubled.

Frightened, even. I could hear it—that tremor of fear, that Oh, no, I could get
hurt
—in Gladys’s voice. But why wasn’t she—why weren’t all of them—angry, like me?

“Of course he’ll go into France,” I said. “And all we can hope is that the French are tougher and smarter than I think they are.”

“What if he beats them?”

“Gladys, what do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“England.”

“No. Come
on
.”

Gladys got up and walked over to an ice cream cart. It was an old white icebox on two bicycle wheels, covered with decals of ice cream pops, cones, and sundaes in every gorgeous color possible. Usually, though, all the carts ever had was vanilla, so soft that by the time it got scooped into the cone and handed over to you, it was mush that flowed over your hand and down your arm.

What if I could
really
talk to John. I’d say, You know, two 80 / SUSAN ISAACS

years ago, right around this time of year, I was sitting on a park bench in Ridgewood with my Grandma Olga. Such a smart lady, but she was still saying, “Hitler and his people. Trash.”

John would believe me. He’d know that when Hitler came into power, most of the German-speaking people in America, like Olga, viewed him as if he was some slobby fifth cousin who shows up at Christmas dinner, shoots off his mouth, and then drools into the
Berliner Schlosspunsch
; he wouldn’t be around long. But he was, and none of those smart German-speakers could explain it or understand it. So they said, Oh, well, what’s the real harm in it? When I’d explained the harm to Olga in 1935 she didn’t believe me. That day in 1938 in the park she’d said, “You’ll see, he’ll calm down, now that everyone takes him seriously.” I answered sharply: “No he won’t. And you-know-who he especially won’t calm down about.”

Olga didn’t say anything, dismissing my reminder; she may have been a Jew, but she wasn’t a
Jew
. Finally she said: “But even if you’re right, Linda, what can we do?”

What can we do? That kind of thinking would make John as crazy as it made me. We’d agree that what got us more than anything else was the effect of that maniac on
everyone
, not just on an old German lady. On big, strong, smart men. Listen to any of his speeches—not the few sentences before the radio switched over to the commentator and the Jell-O commercial—and just
hear
the German under the voice of the translator.

I would turn to John and say, Listen, you know he is out of his mind with his rantings about Siegfried and a whole bunch of stupid Germanic gods—what’s he talking about? And his carrying on about inferior races. What was
he?
John would answer: The lowest of the low. He’d understand.